Tumbleweed is blowing around the private sector-funded body’s imposing offices on Pall Mall in central London, Diary hears, after staff took an early vacation when the CBC stopped trading in mid-July.

On August 19, creditors will meet at the City offices of Begbies Traynor, the firm handling the insolvency process, to appoint a liquidator – and, “if the creditors see fit”, a liquidation committee.

It is unclear how deeply the CBC is in hock to its members and staff. But it seems the organisation, which was set up in 1997 with the brief to promote trade and investment in the Commonwealth nations to achieve “mutual prosperity”, has been struggling for some time.

Its most recently filed accounts, for the year to March 31 2013, show shareholders’ funds dropped by almost four-fifths to £133,000. In April, the CBC agreed a debenture as security for its debts with its lender, HSBC.

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Sadly, not even Lord Marland, the globe-trotting former trade envoy who took over as CBC chairman in February, could stem the decline.

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Which top-shelf Tesco exec will present the ailing grocer’s interim results on October 1?

It’s incoming CEO Dave Lewis’s first day, so he can hardly be expected to present the first-half 2014/15 figures, says retail analyst Nick Bubb. “And it would be embarrassing if ex-CEO Phil Clarke and ex-finance director Laurie Mcllwee were brought back from the dead to take the rap, so we assume that chairman Richard Broadbent will have to do most of the talking.”

Rather fast talking, if Tesco cuts its dividend, as feared.

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Diary is pleased there is a new job in the pipeline for BG Group’s recently departed chief Chris Finlayson, who has resurfaced as chairman of the Papua New Guinea-focused oil explorer InterOil.

Oil-watchers are also delighted. “I suspect Chris will find fewer snakes in Papua New Guinea than he did at BG,” jokes an energy source.

Some say fortune has favoured Nick Wrigley, the City grandee who made his name as NM Rothschild’s chief client handler, before chairing housebuilder Persimmon.

Now not even Hurricane Bertha can rain on his parade.

Diary’s man in North Yorkshire, where Wrigley owns a shooting estate called Ganton, reports that the Caribbean furies held off long enough to bestow “blazing sun” on his daughter's wedding day on Saturday. All those years spent shooting the breeze with rainmakers must be paying off.

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First the Antarctic, now Ireland. The list of countries where Royal Dutch Shell receives a frosty reception continues to lengthen.

The energy major has been told that its sponsorship money for the Emerald Isle’s biggest folk festival, the Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann in Sligo, is no longer acceptable, after eco-campaigners kicked up a storm.

“To avoid any unnecessary distractions on the eve of the festival, we have respectfully decided to return the financial support received from Shell,” said organisers ahead of this week’s event, rather piously.

Poor old Shell is over a barrel because of controversy over its major project to develop the Corrib gas field off the north Mayo coast.

Funnily enough, the fact that RPS Group, the energy consultant that designed the Corrib pipeline, is also one of the Fleadh’s financial backers doesn’t seem to be a problem.

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If Rona Fairhead, the former CEO of the Financial Times, succeeds David Walker as Barclays chairman, as has been speculated, she won’t be the first FT alumnus ruling the Barclays roost.

Martin Taylor, who wrote the newspaper’s Lex column in the 1970s, became Barclays CEO for a four-year spell in the 1990s, before leaving in 1998 after a clash over strategy.

His advice to anyone thinking of sipping from the Barclays chalice?

According to the man who confessed to falling for the “myth” of Bob Diamond’s “indispensability”: “You would have to be a mug not to take it.”